The Academy, the Library, The Observatory, The Laboratory, The Classroom are within You

Distilling Prashant’s Teaching from the week of July 9 on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday—The Academy, the Library, The Observatory, The Laboratory, The Classroom are within You

It’s been a week with Prashant overflowing with wisdom for the practice of yoga as transformation. He keeps reiterating that he is not teaching us—he is rather creating conditions so that we can teach ourselves. “It is really a marvel,” he often will say at the end of class, “what you can learn.” That comment itself brings great joy to my heart.

The title of this blog came about when I was in the midst of an ongoing study of the Bhagavad Gita. Arjuna’s dilemma, how or if to act as the warrior he was trained to be, was coming up in my thoughts with great force. The last decade in Texas has been particularly hard for many of us, for it seems that the state as an entity with power over women and families has wielded that power with greatly detrimental effects. What can I do as one individual, a woman, a yogi, a lawyer, a concerned citizen? Where is my Krishna/Charioteer to give me answers and guide me? How do jnana yoga, karma yoga and bhakti yoga play into my decision to act or not to act? Or do they? These are all questions I’ve been pondering for a long time, hence the name of the blog.

Now that I’ve heard Prashant, and to an extent Geeta in years past, point out that we as practitioners of yoga focus too much on the DOING and not enough on the KNOWING, I’m coming to realize that I’ve despaired long enough and that yes, indeed, it IS time to take action. The action must proceed from a deep space of reflection and meditation and practice. It must come from the heart and from these last 10-20 years of “stuffing” my dismay and despair. I will be a yoga passivist/pacifist no longer. There is a wise Latin saying that if you want peace, prepare for war. I am now preparing for war because I want peace.

Here are the sequences (remember, it is always a round robin, partly, I’m sure, because of the size of the class, easily 70 people attend):

Monday, 9 July:

Adho Mukha Svanasana where you are

Tadasana and

Urdhva baddangulyasana

Sirsasana in ropes or independent or setu bandha with brick

Switch and then bharadvaj after everyone does rope sirsa and ropes 1 (arms behind, standing with heels up) static, then with knees on bolster, arms behind, static

Then marichyasana III

Then ardha matsyendrasana

Then janu sirsasana or vip danda or sal sarv

Then paschimottanasana (hala ok also after sal sarv)

Tuesday, 10 July

Grill adho mukha svanasana with rope

Alternating with rope sirsasana or classic sirsasana

Alternating with baddhakonasana concave, upavistha konasana concave and turning

Bharadvajasana turning

*Urdhva prasarita padasana and pacing ( we did at different speeds—see below)

Standing backarch—(“NOW NOW you can discover something,” said Prashant. I did, but I have no words.

Thursday 12 July

Setu bandha or chair backbend or rope sirsasana

Eventually Padma, if possible, in setu bandha and chair dwi pada vip. danda

Eventually standing back arch and ustrasana and ekapad vip danda in chair

Salamba sarvangasana or viparita karani or janu sirsasana

Again, all Round Robin

In what follows, I’ve done my best to distill more of what Prashant exhorted us to consider while “being” in the asana sequences listed above during this week’s classes.

He spoke of  “inscribing” mind and breath on body, body on mind and breath. He declared “Your body is a book.”  He emphasized that “yog” is not so much about what you DO as a practitioner, but more about what you know and CAN know through the practice and its effects on body, breath and mind.

So, are we literate when we do asana? Are we articulate and can we inscribe the breath on the bodymind?

Literacy and sensitivity do not go together, he said. Sometimes the literate are not sensitive and the sensitive are not literate. (Two asides here: One from Geetaji’s class this morning: “The stomach speaks, the heart speaks, the leg speaks, but you do not listen.” Another aside from Abhijata’s pranayama class last night, a quote from B.K.S. Iyengar, “Feeling is the eye.”

Back to Prashant: “Listen here,” he said, “the body has an observatory, a library and a laboratory within it. Think of what the organs digest and excrete. That can become food for another organ, another place.” He spoke of new automobile technology which allows the byproduct of the consumption of the fuel to be recycled to power the engine anew.

He spoke of “The absoluteness of relativity, or perhaps better said:

The absoluteness of interiority, of our own inner relationship with mind/body/breath. To expand upon this idea somewhat: when someone views YOU in asana, that is a relative thing. When YOU view YOU in asana, that CAN BE absolute, when you are maintaining and finding ways to be ABSORBED in the pose (samyama).

Regarding pacing (see July 10 sequence above), he said that pacing changes your internal ecology. He spoke frequently about how asanas change our internal chemistry, how beginners learn to exhale for evacuation, but as we mature in our practice, we learn to exhale for purification.

He constantly encouraged us to “exhale further and further, extraordinarily deeper” in the asanas.  Every once in awhile he shouted for us to move “QUICKLY” when changing places in the hall for the next round of asanas.

He mentioned “tree-ads”, a word which I finally concluded must be “triads.” The triads referred to were “knower, knowing and known” and “doer, doing and done.”

He also referred to sound forms, and encouraged us to chant single syllable words internally while in various asanas. For example, he mentioned the words, “I, you, come, go,” and the numbers “one, two, three, and so on.”

He pointed out that if you ask a child to be aware of their thoughts, they are not likely to be able to articulate as much about what they are thinking as about what they are liking or disliking. They are emotional, whereas we can watch, witness, listen, and be sensitive to what we are thinking. He also repeatedly mentioned that there is a difference between connectivity and relativity. That is, in the triads mentioned above, it is not enough in yoga practice to be CONNECTED among body mind and breath, we must be related among the three parts of the triad. This requires more sensitivity (see above).

When we are able to relate mind to body and breath, body to breath and mind, breath to mind and body, the practice becomes adyatmik, another Sanskrit word which is basically untranslatable, but often rendered as “spiritual.”  He referred also to the vijnanama kosha, sometimes called the “intellectual sheath”, though again the words are basically untranslatable.

To bring this summary of week two, July 2018, in Prashant’s classes to an end, I’ll quote him again. Once we take on the inner investigation Prashant suggests, when we are brave enough and confident enough to be our own teachers, the “royal road of Yoga opens” for us. Prashant told us that we could assess his teaching if we want in the last class of the week. My friend Dean told him that he passed the assessment. I would heartily agree, but also add that this teaching is beyond assessment and not appropriate for our “system.” It’s for the ages—sarvabhaumah.